NEW YORK -- Nothing is as old as yesterday's future, and the Whitney Museum's "retrospective" devoted to "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe," which opened today, definitely bears the stretch marks of its 1930s origins.

The model of the "Dymaxion Dwelling Units," for example, looks like a little Levittown of Buck Rogers flying saucers parked on Astroturf, and the three-wheeled Dymaxion car (the only one still in existence, which sits in the first-floor entrance gallery of the museum), looks eerily like the fuselage of the Cessna T-50 that Sky King used to fly in the 1940s radio serial and '50s TV show.

And that's just the beginning. It's really the optimism and energy and consarned pugnacious know-it-allness that Fuller embodied -- most influentially in the countercultural '60s and '70s -- that seems so obsolete, so out of step with our chastened America.

And yet there is, undeniably, a core of innovative engineering concepts that animated everything Fuller did. Filled with blueprints, sketches, architectural models, cardboard icosahedrons and MovieTone newsreels mounted on video -- not to mention a 7-foot-tall geodesic dome made entirely of corrugated cardboard -- "Starting With the Universe" sometimes has the look and feel of an ironic installation, a send-up of Utopian fantasies (particularly Bucky's visualization of "floating cities" in giant spheres that kiss the clouds above rocky peaks).

His urge to strip down structure to a skeletal form that would use the least amount of raw materials led him to reject a long architectural tradition of "compression" in favor of designs based on "tension," and that still echoes through contemporary design like the plucking of a taut piano wire.

By "compression" we mean classical architecture's interest in massing significant form and building permanent edifices of stone, metal, and wood, held together like a Roman arch by the extraordinary weight of those materials themselves. Fuller was more intrigued by light structures held up by exquisitely opposed forces, like the way the masts and sails of a ship are held in rigid form by cables. That was the secret of his most successful concept, those domes, which are now used all around the world for everything from quickly assembled shelter to housing for radar dishes on U.S. Navy cruisers.

Contemporary architects use these same principles all the time today, though rarely to create domes (they're stuffy and leaky, unfortunately). But the very best of new computer-generated architectural design is all about calculating the exact forces that can make a building stand with very little real post-and-lintel construction, and we probably have Fuller to thank for that.

And his transdisciplinary vision of art and technology together building a better, egalitarian, and ultimately more ecological, world? Well, he wasn't the great-nephew of transcendentalist/feminist writer Margaret Fuller, cofounder of the magazine The Dial with Ralph Waldo Emerson, for nothing. Fuller did often seem to transcend not just architectural forces but quotidian demands of political and economic forces. That has become the basis of his claims to being a prophet.

Whether or not the specific notions he put forward for modern life are ever realized, one aspect of his thought has certainly become a pillar of our current world: Fuller pushed his thought out to global scale long before that was at all common. We all do that now -- and that's still as new as today's future.